14 DAY TRIAL // On May 20, the WebKitGTK+ team, through Carlos Garcia Campos, announced the immediate availability for download of the ninth maintenance release of WebKitGTK+ 2.4, GNOME's port of the WebKit rendering engine.
According to the changelog, WebKitGTK+ 2.4.9 is a bugfix release for the stable 2.4 series of the engine, bringing HiDPI (High Dots Per Inch) support for non-accelerated compositing contents, and support for checking TLS (Transport Layer Security) errors immediately after they're set in SoupMessage, in order to prevent data from getting to the server in case the certificate in invalid.
Additionally, the WebKitGTK+ 2.4.9 update now clears the GObject DOM (Document Object Model) bindings internal cache every time web view contents are being updated, or frames are being destroyed. Also, the latin1 character encoding is now used for HTTP header values instead of UTF-8, and numerous bugs have been squashed (see below for details).
Over ten bugs have been resolved in WebKitGTK+ 2.4.9
As mentioned, WebKitGTK+ 2.4.9 is mainly a bugfix release, which means that multiple issues reported by users since the previous version have been patched. Among these, we can mention fixes for problems with various transfer annotations in GObject DOM bindings, a memory leak in the webkit_web_policy_decision_new function, and runtime warnings of the g_closure_unref function.
Furthermore, a crash that occurred when the drag image was empty during drag and drop operations has been fixed, synchronous loads that happened when maximum connection limits were reached are now resolved, and a crash that occurred in the ScrollView::contentsToWindow() function when there was no parent for GtkPluginWidget has been patched.
Last but not least, the ninth maintenance release of WebKitGTK+ 2.4 fixes issues with rendering of scrollbars when using GTK+ 3.16 or higher, adds a workaround for build problems on mingw32/msys, fixes compilation issues that occurred when WebKit2 was disabled, correctly checks for the Clang version when running the configure script, and addresses a build issue with recent versions of the GLib library that have GMutexLocker.
The new point release of the stable WebKitGTK+ 2.4 engine can now be built when accelerated compositing is disabled and it supports the MIPS64EL (MIPS 64-bit Little Endian) architecture on GNU/Linux operating systems. Download WebKitGTK+ 2.4.9 right now from the official website.